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Hero Node Code Review by Andre Cronje

May. 10, 2018

Fog computing won’t be familiar to everyone, so the Hero Node code review here will be a little out of the ordinary and maybe not as recognizable as some of the code we’ve looked at together.

Hero Node is a next generation (is everyone next generation?) decentralized Blockchain fog computing platform. It’s a Blockchain As A Service (BAAS) platform. So what are they? Essentially they are a mapping layer, they do all the hard work of implementing the domain knowledge of the different systems, ETH, Qtum, Wan, IPFS, and so forth, and they provide a single easy to use code base (in javascript) for developers to use to build their dApps.

So you want to have a smart contract in ETH?, store value in Qtum, and store data on IPFS? This will allow you to do it, it’s a fantastic idea that will make developer lives infinitely easier. Does this need a token though?

We as a community should definitely support projects like this, they will enable long term adoption, but I don’t know if they need their own cryptocurrency. That aside though, they are tackling an infinitely difficult problem, even the entire Ethereum ecosystem has yet to solve this problem and it has massive amounts of teams all concurrently working towards a solution.

So can they do this mammoth task? Let’s jump into the code.

Definitely most interested in Hero Node, so I’m going to start with hero-cli first. I’ll leave the node as the dessert.

Good documentation, looks like it just creates app skeletons for now for android or web. No crypto libraries included, but I guess that makes sense, you are suppose to talk to their API’s and they abstract the underlying blockchain logic.

Nothing interesting in cli, it just deploys the skeleton and then has some hosting and listener services around it, nothing that isn’t already available.

Let’s look at hero-js.

A bunch of pre-designed HTML components, no meat, I’m looking for their chain implementations. This is just boilerplate. I’m going to jump into the Node.

Ok awesome, finally seeing some ipfs, web3, and web3-eth.

We are looking for .action(add), utils are boilerplate.

Side chain RPC proxy for ETH. That’s interesting, let’s keep digging.

This above is add apparently.

They have an IPFS uploader.

Here Node Code Review Conclusion:

This was disappointing. Everything that interested me isn’t here. There is some javascript boilerplate, and some really basic implementations. All in all probably a month or so worth of work. Right now it doesn’t look like anything yet.

Disclaimer: Crypto Briefing code reviews are performed by auditing what is on display in the master branch of the repo’s made available. This was performed as an educational review and any comments in the article are the opinion of the writer. It is normal for code to change rapidly, hence we timestamp our code reviews so that they present a snapshot at a moment in time. Information contained herein should not be used as any comment or advice on the project as a whole.

Hero Node Code Review Timestamp: May 9th, 2018 at 15:07 GMT

Read Andre Cronje’s other code reviews here.

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